Showing titles in City Life

Grand Life Apartments is a middle-class apartment block surrounded by lush gardens in the coastal city of Chennai, India. It is the home of Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be retired dentist who spends her days counting down to the annual visits from her daughter who is studying in the UK. Her neighbour, Revathi, is a thirty-two-year-old engineer who is frequently reminded by her mother that she has reached her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Jason, a British chef, has impulsively moved to India to escape his recent heartbreak in London. 

Life is waiting to happen to Hubert Bird. But first he has to open his front door and let it in. In weekly phone calls to his daughter in Australia, widower Hubert Bird paints a picture of the perfect retirement, packed with fun, friendship and fulfilment. But Hubert Bird is lying. The truth is...

Mistake #1: One scorching night with Jacob Walker, Chicago Blade's notorious playboy and my brother's best friend. Mistake #2: Agreeing to be his fake fiancé to save his career. Mistake #3: Falling for the man who doesn't know he's about to become our baby's daddy. Jacob has a body forged in steel and a smile that can melt the ice… he's every woman's fantasy. I'm the team's new strait-laced PR executive tasked with cleaning up his image... while hiding my growing secret. Whenever he holds me close for the cameras, it feels less like pretend.

Isa Epley is 21 years old and wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. In her diary she chronicles her New York City adventure during the sweltering summer of 2013. By day, Isa and her best friend, Gala, sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, and bad-mannered grifters. 

When Sara Foster runs away from home at 16, she leaves behind not only the losses that have shattered her world but the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

Brought to you by Penguin. The sensational Korean bestseller For fans of WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY and THE ALCHEMIST Welcome to the Marigold Mind Laundry where we wash away the stains from your heart. After young Jieun accidentally misuses her powers, causing her beloved family...

‘A sweet, hilarious treat’ – Christina Lauren, author of The Soulmate Equation Their love story has gone viral. But it hasn’t even begun . . . Franny Doyle is having the worst day. She’s been sacked, the subway doors ripped her favorite dress to ruins, and now she’s flashed her...

There are stories we never talk about. Stories we are afraid to share. Simply because they hurt too much or no one wants to listen to them. Such was the story of Jhanvi, who is a budding social media influencer. She appears to have it all together, but something is missing: Jhanvi has this impossible need that drives her to be more perfect than any person could possibly be. And the story of Ashray, who had a rocky start in life. With hard work and determination, he translates his dreams into reality, but his deep-seated insecurities come to the fore when life throws him a curveball.

Full-cast dramatisations of three insightful novels by Christopher Isherwood, plus a bonus interview Novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood is best known for The Berlin Stories of pre-Hitler Germany, which inspired the musical Cabaret. Many of his works have been adapted for stage and...

On a December morning in 1982, the courtyard of a Beijing siheyuan - a lively quadrangle of homes - begins to stir. Auntie Xue’s son Jiyue is getting married today, and she is determined to make the day a triumph. Despite Jiyue’s woeful ignorance in matters of the heart - and the body. Despite a chef in training tasked with the onerous responsibility of preparing the banquet.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the author of The Power, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017 Naomi Alderman's The Lessons reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late. Hidden away in an Oxford back street is a crumbling Georgian mansion, unknown to any...

Brought to you by Penguin. Normal People meets The Dropout with a dash of Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow in this epic love story of two young Harvard students with a shared dream who are drawn into the vortex of American start-up culture. A GOODREADS HOTTEST DEBUT NOVEL OF 2025 THE 2025 DEBUT...

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood. The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from...

Read by Sally Phillips Meet Nell. She’s like the thousands of women who’ve fallen in love with her story. Because most of us wonder why life isn’t turning out quite as we imagined. From bedside to poolside, this book is the perfect summer listen. It will make you laugh and it may make you...

A city teeters on the edge of chaos. A society lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. A playground becomes a battleground. A looming silence grips the public.First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorization―it's a time capsule, a...

What's more important—revenge . . . or the child you never knew you had? Jolie Chapman was my first love. Now she's my most bitter enemy. Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice . . . who am I kidding—I don't believe in second chances anymore. Tripp Montgomery was my first love. I gave him my innocence. Then he broke my heart. And I committed the ultimate betrayal. These Manhattan royals are out for revenge. Sweet, sweet revenge. But there's something they want more. Their daughter.

The trip of a lifetime! Rosie Lewis has her life together. A swanky job as a Michelin-starred Sous Chef, a loving husband and future children scheduled for an exact date. That’s until she comes home one day to find her husband’s pre-packed bag and a confession that he's had an affair...

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of Victorian England's pre-eminent female novelists. Admired by Charles Dickens, who described her as his 'dear Scheherazade', she mingled storytelling and social realism to superb effect in her highly acclaimed fiction. This comprehensive collection comprises dramas and readings of her finest works and some lesser-known pieces.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.